Creative Crackers
Whitney Lamy ’80 never saw herself doing just one thing for her entire career. An artist at heart, she has always gravitated toward jobs that provided a creative outlet. Through her latest venture, Castleton Crackers, Lamy is applying her creative energies and love of baking to develop her product line of hand-made artisan crackers and market it around the country.
Where has your career path taken you?
I graduated from UMass in 1980 and was a graphic designer at a newspaper in Salem, MA for five years. From there I went to running a historic, federal-period mansion that was also a rental facility in Salem, MA for eight years. My role there was function director. I did everything from designing brochures to working with caterers.
That’s where my interest in cooking really came together. I had the opportunity to look over the shoulder of some amazing caterers from the Boston area. And at that time my children were little, so it was a lot harder to pull out a box of paints or my drawing pad and focus on anything artistically. I found that I could satisfy my creative needs by cooking. I could make bread and cookies and feel very creative, while feeding the family.
In 1992, my husband Philip, who is also a graduate of UMass Amherst, was offered a professorship at Castleton State College, so we moved to Vermont.
I took a break and was just a mom for a little while before getting into my next round of jobs. I had a small business creating scratch and sniff educational greeting cards, taught art in a local public school, as well as being an adjunct professor in the art department at Castleton College, and then went into art management for some local non-profit galleries.
All the while, I sort of had this nagging question—do I want to open my own little bakery/café? At that point I was in my 50s and after doing a lot of research, the reality started to come together that I didn’t really want to get up at 3:00 a.m. to manage this type of business. That’s when I thought, well let me try the crackers. My kids were off in college; I could bake at home during the week and schlep off to the farmers market on the weekends. It all started very innocently.
What was it about artisan crackers that intrigued you?
What really prompted me to start selling my crackers was the rise of artisanal cheeses in Vermont. A number of years ago the Vermont Cheese Counsel was formed and brought together a lot of the smaller cheese makers. So as someone who had been baking homemade crackers, I paid attention to that over the years and would go into specialty food stores around Vermont and check the cracker shelves to see if anyone was doing artisanal crackers to compliment all these artisanal cheeses. I just didn’t see anyone doing it and I thought, well maybe now is the time to give it a whirl.
How do you develop your recipes?
I am an avid cookbook reader. When I get a new cookbook, I read it from cover to cover like I’m reading a novel. After doing that for years and years, I’ve developed a good knowledge of recipes; what works and what doesn’t and what techniques are used again and again.
Baking is a little more scientific and precise than regular cooking. I find that with regular cooking you can be more inventive and throw in this or substitute that. You can’t do that quite as much with baking; you need certain things to rise or not rise based on the combination of chemicals.
But once you understand the scientific basis, there is room for creativity. What I did with my cracker recipes was look for a bunch of different recipes that intrigued me, and then using really high quality, wholesome ingredients, I just tried to adapt my recipe to not only living in Vermont but what I thought would be interesting flavors.
You’ve reinvented yourself a number of times in your career. Was this by design?
It actually goes back to my days at UMass as an art education major. A lot of my contemporaries studying art were choosing careers such as print maker, illustrator or painter. I always found it hard for me to say that I wanted to be one thing.
I remember one of my professors said to me, “You are much more marketable, the more things you can do and you’ll be less likely to lock yourself into one career path.” I remember thinking, wow that makes me feel really good because I don’t have to be just one thing!
What was the most daunting part of launching out as an entrepreneur in your 50s?
I think the hardest part in the beginning was the amount of physical work it took. I started baking in my home for the farmers market and because it was so well received, the quantities kept increasing and I had to bake more. And being the art person that I am, I just ordered a bunch of bags online and thought I could use calligraphy to handwrite “Castleton Crackers” and the flavor on the bag. Well, 8,000 bags later I almost couldn’t hold a pen anymore!
It was at that point that I had some great advice from a business consultant and good friend of mine. He recommended looking for a manufacturer to make my crackers so I could focus on sales and marketing.
That was really excellent advice because today, I can still operate out of my house and I don’t have the worries of overhead or renting a manufacturing facility. I really love the flexibility of working at home and the flexibility of making my own hours. And with technology today, I can be on the road, checking email, answering phone messages, and still running my business. So I am finding that in my 50s, this is the lifestyle that I want.
What is the scope of your distribution for Castleton Crackers?
2010 is a really exciting year! I am fairly well represented throughout New England on the shelves of Whole Foods and I was just picked up by a chain of all natural food stores called Fresh Market, as well.
So my next goal is New York and further south. I have brokers that I’m working with in New York and New Jersey and all the way down to Florida. Sales are already up over 300% compared to 2009 and we’re coming into the third and fourth quarter, which are the busiest.
Which recipe did you provide for the UMass Amherst Cookbook?
Roasted Onion and Dried Cranberry Dip. It’s a wonderful recipe—I hope people enjoy it.